Miss Massacre's Guide to Murder and Vengeance Read online

I had to pull the bag-lady routine to get up here, using a wheelchair and pushing a shopping cart to carry my goods. It was loud and obnoxious, but people don’t see the homeless. I used to be a crusader about that kind of thing. Does it count as exploiting the homeless if pretending to be one makes your job easier? Shopping carts are fabulous war wagons. Couple of blankets to cover my “junk”: my assortment of legs, some food, and my current prize possession – the rifle case. It’s a fabulous red attaché I found in my van, gold closures, alligator hide, nice. I can’t remember what I used to keep in it, but a little foam and some ingenuity made it the perfect stash case when I broke my equipment down. It’s the only vanity I allow myself. Which makes me even angrier, because everything I brought is down there, and some fucker’s going through it. Every option I had to get out, whether on wheels or wobbling legs, and someone’s rooting through it. My whole life.

  I try to think of a contingency plan, but fatigue stops me. My hands give out and I fall into an open dumpster, into the embrace of warm decay. My remaining leg strikes the dumpster on the way in, and the sound tolls like a funeral church bell for a good minute. A whole person would have been in real trouble had they taken that fall. I think about how many bones the impact with the dumpster would have shattered and it almost makes me wistful.

  No sense waiting. Everyone in the city heard me. If someone’s out there waiting to pop me, they’ll be on the way. Might as well meet them halfway there. I pull myself up to the edge of the dumpster. The alley seems clear, but I know better than to trust my eyes. I drop over the edge, go flat, flopping and snaking my way across the alley floor. My shopping cart is on its side. Empty.

  No walking legs. No running legs. No case for the rifle. Not that it matters, because I don’t see the rifle either. And at the end of the alley, my wheelchair is gone. My ride is gone.

  I pull myself up and teeter slightly on my one good leg before smacking down to the pavement. My other leg lays by my face, not much the worse for the tumble. Its empty socket stares at me, accusing me, cursing me for letting it drop. I pull it back on and stagger to my feet.

  Where’s my rifle?

  My thighs are getting cold. When I start shivering, the phantom pains come. I miss my feet. I can feel them, freezing, stinging. I look down and see that I’m standing in a puddle. Now that makes me happy. The buzz dies when I try to move my toes. They’re moving, all ten of them, but they should feel wet and they don’t. Ghosts.

  I’ll have to walk out of here on my climbing legs, which is going to be hard, because they’re hinged differently. They’re really only designed for me to rest my weight on while I’m going up. They have a little bit of spring to give me a boost. But they make me about a foot and a half shorter than I should be. I’m going to look like a drunken dwarf dancing down the street in the rain. I can’t do it. I don’t need the attention. It would be the equivalent of rolling in Vasili’s bloody corpse and trying to walk down the street like nothing was wrong.

  So I’m left to contemplate things. My keys are still in my hip pouch. Problem is, my van is half a mile down the street. Ever try walking half a mile on your hands after climbing down a building? Plus, someone took my stuff. They could still be here for all I know. Or they’re waiting to call someone in. The cops. A hit squad. Anything.

  And it’s still raining. The good news is, that gives me some cover, masks my noise. The bad news is, it does the same for anyone else who may be following me.

  Rooting around in the garbage and filth, I find an old blanket. It’ll work. I steady myself on a trashcan and create a makeshift toga to cover my stainless steel gams. The street is pulsing red and blue, and there are voices on top of voices.

  I stumble, and I flop, and I catch myself on the walls, and I stop every five feet to bend over to catch my breath. And none of it is an act.

  Nobody said being a professional killer was easy. Well, I’m not really professional. Nobody is paying for this. This is a labor of love. Or some other emotion. Emotion is something from my past life too, but thankfully it carried over.

  The rain has let up enough that I don’t stand out on the sidewalk. The nice thing about pulling a hit in an upscale area is that rich people are voracious spectators. I think it’s the idea that something is happening where money and power make no difference. Or maybe they like to see suffering, to be reminded of pain. I don’t know.

  I don’t care. I’m jostling along, my troubles inching slowly behind me. Fifty feet away from my van, right around the time when I really start to feel like I’ve made it, right when my thighs feel like someone is dipping them in acid and I can barely breathe, a car drives by. The headlights are off and the windows are tinted, so I can’t count how many people are inside.

  They don’t honk. There’s only one noise, just a little louder than the rain hitting the pavement.

  It’s one of my walking legs, bent up like a pretzel.

  Chapter Two

  Somebody was sending me a warning that could have come from a Dick Tracy comic. All I was missing was the yellow coat and hat.

  Am I scared? No.

  Angry? I would say no, but I just spent the evening climbing up a building so I could kill someone. Any good therapist would say I have issues.

  What I am is several hundred dollars in the hole. Vengeance killing isn’t a cash-flow kind of thing. Like any starving artist, everything I do comes from the heart. No sense getting mad. I can’t chase the guy down. I’ll just have to hope number nine has some cash in her wallet.

  What a night. Why does anybody bother making plans? Shit like this always happens. I was keeping my head down. Totally off radar with everything I did and bought. Nobody was supposed to know this was starting tonight.

  And yet.

  So I need to hurry. One week, tops. Someone knows I’m coming, and they’re telling me they’re ready. The problem is, this isn’t a pyramid or a video game. I’m not climbing to the top for a final confrontation. I purposely arranged the list so that I wouldn’t necessarily have to work harder as I progressed. This could be a message from number one or number seven, or maybe just someone who’s angry they didn’t make the list.

  I’m looking for nine people whose only connection is that they’re all part of two horrific nights in my life. I was classic, white-bred, Middle America. Even though my feminist college professors would cringe to hear me say it, a housewife’s greatest treasure is her home and her family. It goes with the job description. They stole it from me.

  My whole life turned upside down in two heartbeats on two separate nights. I don’t remember much of what happened before. Just that my husband and daughter are both dead, and I was supposed to die too. Who has time for details? Not me.

  My list, they’re all connected, in the criminal sense of the word. But not to each other. They run in the dark spaces between the walls of the city. They feed on the people society throws out. Drug addicts, sex addicts, the asylum inmates freed by the lack of tax-dollar support. All of these people grind up the city’s human refuse and get rich.

  And one of them knows somebody strong enough to bend airplane-grade aluminum poles with their bare hands. Looking at the rain-spattered metal and plastic, I start to wish for phantom pains. Somebody broke my leg. I want to feel it. Really feel it. I feel it in my heart.

  Prosthetic legs aren’t cheap. Sure, you can get them in almost every city. They’re not that hard to find. It’s like buying shoes. Some people, they don’t care what kind of shoes they wear. Some people are picky for whatever reason. Fashion. Comfort. Quality.

  Me, I just want reliability. And you don’t get that just anywhere. I have one dealer. His legs don’t stand up to what I put them through for very long. But they do stand up. Or run. Or climb. Whichever design I ask for. And unfortunately for me, his shop was hundreds of miles from here. Actually, it’s just across town. When you don’t have legs, every measure of distance is a matter of semantics.

  My main problem is this: I didn’t budget for this le
vel of catastrophe. I can’t remember my name, let alone my bank account number. Waking up into this new life, finding my house trashed, all I could do was scrape together money, things to pawn, and then get on with my life. It’s not like I’m Bruce Wayne. I’m not stockpiling these things in a cave beneath a mansion. I keep all of my legs under a tarp in the back of my van.

  In my past life, I had a lot of shoes. A lot.

  We live and learn.

  Now, all I have is climbing legs. It all sounds so optimistic. I’m sure if society wasn’t so disgusted by mass murder, my story could be a movie of the week.

  News at ten, movie at eleven: “Legs of Steel: Steps Toward Hope.”

  And then there’s the matter of my rifle. Sure, I can get a new one from the same guy that does my legs. But you lose enough unregistered weaponry and it will make any dealer nervous. Something could come back on them.

  I have three guns left in the van. I could go rob a store to get money for some new equipment. And at this point, I’m ready for it. I wouldn’t even ask for the money, I’d just put a slug in the cashier’s leg, take what I need and get out. With these dwarfy climbing appendages for a smash-and-grab robbery, I don’t have a leg to stand on. (In my past life, I found jokes about handicapped people offensive.)

  I’m almost at my van now. The last thirty feet, I’m passing by the front of an electronics store. A wall of TVs lines the display behind the glass, all of them on different City News reports. At least fifteen faces stare at me. Women too mannish to make it to the big-time cable news networks. Men with those weird big square heads and side-part George Jetson hairdos. Pasty face-lifted puppets who tell us things for our own good. The little headline over their shoulder, silhouettes with turbans superimposed over different phrases:

  City under invasion.

  Or…

  City Under Siege?

  Or…

  Terror in the City.

  These three-word combinations the result of hours of back-room closed meetings with ad and network execs. Then the real artistry starts. The video packages roll:

  Shadowy figures. Slow-motion shots of Sikh men buying groceries or talking on cell phones. Black men hanging out on street corners or in parking lots. Poor white trash in hunter’s safety orange jackets putting gas in their trucks or conversing over meals. Subtle hints: this is your enemy. Be on the lookout for this.

  Then the money shot, live, thirty yards from the yellow tape surrounding Vincenzo’s. Vasili’s lumpy mess covered with a black body-bag while the police scour for spent shells, witnesses, leads. And all of a sudden, I realize this is all about me, and I love the news.

  This is America the Scared. Nobody likes people with guns now, not even the gun nuts. The news eats it up. Every crime is now committed by a disgruntled black man, a disgruntled Arab (but only if mass murder or explosives are involved), or a disgruntled white man. What I do, sure, it comes on the news at night. People are trying to make connections.

  Closed-captioned frightened suburbanites are claiming to have spotted me just before the shootings. They’ve described me as a Middle-Eastern man. Saying I muttered something about Jihad. Another lady is interviewed saying I was a black teen, baseball cap pulled low, hoodie pulled up. The government is eating it all up. Be on the lookout for a terrorist. A dark man. A swarthy man. They keep looking for answers half a world away. He’s got dark skin. He’s probably ex-military.

  Nobody sees a woman. Just fine with me.

  Half of the killings that flash by on the screen are just random gang activity. But it’s what I’m doing, and where I’m doing it, that’s making the difference. It’s gotten over the sanctified walls of suburbia. The middle-class is involved, and now all murder must stop. The chief of police is up there, vowing to get the man responsible, promising more patrols to keep the peace. That means one or two more patrol cars in safe neighborhoods, which means they’ll be pulled from poor neighborhoods where they’re needed desperately. Here I am thinking politics when I should be thinking ratings. One more high-profile kill will really thin out the police presence in the seedier parts of town, and I’ll be able to make a lot more noise before anyone comes running.

  And how do they follow all of this death and destruction?

  A formerly (and still mostly) paralyzed celebrity is showing the world he can move his finger. Who cares? I can still feel it when I move my feet. I can still feel my toes twitch. I just don’t have the dead weight to drag around. If I were him, I’d focus that finger until it was good and strong. Strong enough to pull a trigger. Go find that car that broadsided you. Go nail that horse that bucked you. Don’t sit back and take anything, ever again.

  Thank God I can still move. I don’t know what I would do if I was trapped in a chair. Don’t know what I’d do to calm myself. Well, actually, I do know what I’d do. It’s in a bottle in my backpack.

  Mother’s Little Helper. Clearwater, all the rage in injectable fun. When I was confined to a hospital bed, when they were still cauterizing nerves and blood vessels, and feeding me with a drip bag, I made a new friend. We’ll call her Mrs. Morphine. She came to visit me with the push of a button. Because nerves don’t die easy. They make sure your whole body knows that you’re never going to feel again. They flare in panic, they send jolts of electricity screaming through your bones. But my new friend, she would wash down my veins and make everything cool and blue and murky.

  I had a little trouble shaking her when I left the hospital. Then I met her bigger, stronger uncle, Mr. Clearwater. He’s like one of those bad sexual affairs that housewives have. He still comes around, but I only want him there when things get really rough. And sometimes they still do. When I feel like someone is boring into my spine with a rusted file. Then I ride Mr. Clearwater. He really likes me, and I’ve been having a hard time telling him no lately. I’ve got at least nine more dates with him, and it makes me smile.

  Nerves. Just nerves.

  I catch my breath. Now the screens are showing a picture of Charles Baldacci, last month’s target. Loving tributes from family members. It’s obvious some of them didn’t really know him. They just wanted to be on TV. They should send me a thank you card.

  Was he a criminal? Did he just have a bad reputation? I know the truth. I don’t know why the media isn’t showing any of this. They’re acting like he’s just a loving family man in the right place at the wrong time. A good, bullet-riddled Samaritan. His blood is in the gutter. His memory should be too. Why should he get the lead on city news? Why should he get time on CNN?

  When everything happened to me, I only got one piece. One little five-minute story that didn’t rate.

  Woman can’t walk.

  Brave woman pays the price for testifying.

  After me came a five-parter on animals who could play sports. They spent two nights on the annual Air Show. I got five minutes. The parties responsible for my condition should not be so lucky.

  Getting out of the hospital, running the gauntlet of microphones and cameras. And the questions. All of the stupid questions. They knew I couldn’t talk, and yet.

  “If you could speak to your attackers, what would you say?”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “How does this make you feel as a woman?”

  And on and on and on.

  The answers are:

  I am speaking to my attackers, one at a time, just like Wyatt Earp.

  Am I afraid? I’ve always been afraid, but not of the things you’d think.

  And as a woman, I feel pretty, oh so pretty.

  Where did I leave my keys?

  Chapter Three

  Oprah’s on TV, giving one of those weak high-fives to some chunky woman, and I’m there, so there, saying “you go girl”, and blubbering right along with them.

  Positive change today.

  Make my life right.

  This happens sometimes. If I stay out late, tap a little too deeply into the bottle, I get these weird thoughts while I try to sleep. Mostly it’s on
the nights my pain gets too great. A quick fix, one that I instantly regret when I close my eyes. Flashbacks of that other life, that faraway time.

  The house has deep-pile carpet. The curtains are an embarrassing homemade job that was inspired by one of those crafty TV women. Sort of a sash on a gnarled branch that arcs over my window. Bringing the outside in. To make my house warm. To bring nature to my place of living, so that I won’t have to go out and experience nature to experience nature.

  I have legs though.

  Glorious, long legs. Legs that are more Jayne Mansfield than Mama Cass. The kind of legs that keep people interested. When I get like this, I spend a lot of time looking at my legs. Why not? Enjoy them while I think I have them.

  The living room is a tastefully done, well-decorated museum of trinkets and knick-knacks. Not too gaudy. Sort of a museum of nearly art. Mass-produced, hand-crafted, collectible things that may rise in value, or may depreciate over time. A collection that is different from a million other households in America only in the way I choose to arrange it.

  Oprah keeps talking. I keep listening. Something about men. I can’t understand what she’s saying anymore.

  Then she comes in. Not Oprah. My daughter.

  At least I think that’s who she is. This girl. She smiles at me for a while, and then she sits next to me. I think she’s asking questions.

  I feel my face drift into a honey-warm smile at the sight of her, feel that connection, that protective instinct, the desire to know everything about her, to marvel at all she’s done. A couple of bad trips ago, I got this rancid fire in my stomach when I saw her, and I knew it was because she’s gone now. I knew that my list was at least about revenge. And I knew, looking into her eyes, that I would do anything for her.

  She’s still talking. Her face melts into a mask of despair when I don’t answer. She’s repeating something. Shaking me.

  “Not again. Not again.”

  That’s what it sounds like, but I’m not sure. She’s looking over her shoulder for something. The door is still open. A shape ghosts into the living room. Dark, shadowy.